


Under The Stairs

by 3monstereeter



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: M/M, M/M implied, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-05
Updated: 2019-09-05
Packaged: 2020-10-10 14:24:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 563
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20529497
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/3monstereeter/pseuds/3monstereeter
Summary: While Death Eaters deal with Dumbledore and Draco and Ron try to understand each other, we find out what Harry Potter has been doing for most of this war.





	Under The Stairs

Most of the world is wide and scary places, and this was as true at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry as it was anywhere else. All children understand that all sacred spaces are terrifying, and learn quickly that no space is safe if adults claim it is. Adults are more concerned with making boys into men,and only specific kinds of men at that. 

Every adult is a Dursley at heart. That much Harry Potter learned early on. Though wizards kept pretending it was not true. The Boy Who Loved was never the Boy Who Loved. No one loved him. No one should. He belonged under cupboards and hidden under the stairs, but no one at Hogwarts would believe that. They said, ‘You’re a Gryffindor, Harry’ as if everyone didn’t have courage, as if no one else could be brave. 

The only brave people Harry Potter had ever known were the Dursleys. Petunia knew his mother. She knew what Harry was and she had been brave enough to punish him, to hurt him. Vernon’s belt had found him more often than Dudley, but it had found them both. Dudley was everything a real man should be: big, strong, certain in himself. 

And if Harry had been the sacrifice for that to happen, he was content. Better to be a sacrifice than to be a tool. Everyone expected so much. The wizards who were impressed that he was not dead, as if it was anything Harry had actually done. His enemies, who expected him to destroy them without ever talking to him at all. At least Muggles had hostage negotiators and diplomats. Wizards just had good and evil and ‘unforgivable’ curses that were just akin to guns and mental illnesses wizards seemed scared to admit existed because they couldn’t cure it. 

And the teachers. All praising the parents he had never known. Saying what great promise he had, and then looking so disappointed, one after another, as he failed to fit their imagined reality at all. Only Dobby understood him. 

When he was around Dobby, Harry could be Dudley. He could be strong, and real, if only for a few moments. And then he would order Dobby to be in charge, and it was always a relief. Even their private forbidden moments together were never a relief, not like that.

There was a nice storage cupboard in the kitchen he liked to sleep in. Dobby would order him around each day as Harry asked him to. Sometimes Dobby used charms to be one of the Durleys, and only then did Harry feel at all at home at Hogwarts. 

In his cupboard. Under the stairs. Where he didn’t have to think about Ron and Draco and why no one looked at him the way they looked at each other as if no one else in the universe mattered at all. They still had to hide. Everyone had their cupboard under a set of stairs; Harry Potter was slowly figuring that out. 

Even Dobby, whose magic outrivaled any wizard, was a lowly house elf. 

Only the Durleys did not have to hide. Because Harry had taken on their sins, had been punished as he deserved to be punished. Harry Potter huddled in the storage closet in the kitchen and waited in vain for a single wizard to understand what the Muggles had always known.


End file.
